avevale_intelligencer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2005-05-14 11:15 pm
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2005-05-14 11:15 pm
(no subject)
And once again Doctor Can't-Do, having caused the imminent destruction of the earth, gets taken out of the picture so that a--but wait, hang on. This time the one who saves the day is a man. Shock horror! I am now quite convinced that in no episode of this series will the Doctor actually achieve anything. He's not supposed to. This Doctor is not a hero, he's a troublemaker, and the heroes are the "ordinary people" whose importance he hymns in this episode. Whether we want to see a drama series about an excessively powerful idiot who goes around causing trouble and having to be rescued by ordinary people is a moot point...I think I'd prefer to watch Doctor Who, actually.
I have said elsewhere that I don't think this character is the Doctor. I think come the final episode it's going to tiurn out that the real Doctor has been tied up in a box somewhere in the TARDIS while this pathetic impostor pretends to be him. I may be wrong--I hope so--but so far I've not seen any sign of the Doctor I remember.
Apart from that, Mr Slavering Fanboy, what did you think of the show? Well, it suffered from the usual problems people have with so-called time paradoxes, and here I'm skating close to the Q word so I'll try and steer clear, honest. What we have is the City On the Edge Of Forever plot, for those who remember Star Trek: time traveller saves beloved person's life only to discover that s/he has Changed The Past and therefore everything has to be undone and the beloved person has to die All Over Again, sob sob. The old DW would have taken four to six episodes to explore the ramifications of the change in history, showing how the future diverges because of this seemingly trivial event, putting regular cast members in moustaches and eyepatches and redressing the set to look almost but not quite familiar, and so on. But this is the twenty-first century, we've only got forty minutes and nobody wants to think, so we have ghastly things called Reapers erupting out of thin air and swallowing people because there's a wound in time, apparently, and till it's healed they're going to go on sterilising the wound till everybody's dead.
The assumption, common in these stories, that there's a Proper Way history has to go and if it strays off the path the universe goes kafoofie is called determinism and we'll come back to it. The assumption that there are beasties living outside the time stream looking for a way in is well known to slavering fanboys: they're called chronovores and we saw one back in the Pertwee days. (I think one's appeared in the BF audios as well...) That they feast on human flesh is a new one on me: that's carnivores, surely? The assumption that if you meet yourself the universe will go into meltdown is also well-known and a good dramatic device, but doesn't hold up: the only thing Rose-grown-up and Rose-infant share is some DNA, none of the cells outside their brain will be the same, and even if they were it would be just like touching your own arm. There's no evidence anywhere that the universe cares who you are: why should it start now? But, as I say, it's a useful way of building tension, so let that pass.
The ending is not acceptable. Rose's dad decides, after Doc Useless has got chomped by a Reaper, that the only way to save the world is to heal the wound in time. For no adequately explored reason, the car that should have killed him is haunting him, driving round and round the church and popping in and out of view at random intervals. So the brave young chap runs out into his path and duly dies...hours later, in a completely different part of London, and in front of several witnesses who shouldn't have seen it happen.
This is not healing the wound in time. The only thing that could have healed the wound in time is for the death to happen in exactly the place and time it originally happened. Determinism isn't fuzzy, it's exact. If time is that picky that not stepping on a butterfly destroys the universe, then stepping on another butterfly half a mile away next Tuesday won't cut it. The universe is still toast, sorry, bye-bye. But no, all the Reapers wanted was a death, and sated on slaughter they duly wink out and everyone they ate comes back, just as if creatures from outside time were subject to time paradoxes as well. Rose has her closure, nobody else remembers anything (except seeing a terrible road accident, which will doubtless influence them in many new and exciting ways in this alternate future) and Rose and Doctor Incompetent walk off into the TARDIS, he looking from the rear remarkably like Charlie Chaplin, which may or may not be intentional.
I'm not usually this picky. My disbelief is quite easy to suspend and stays up for hours. But this incarnation of Doctor Who is so nearly good, so nearly right (I'm even getting used to the music, though I think the strings are lagging) and yet so infuriatingly wrong in so many ways that I think I could have coped better if they'd set it in New York and cast Leslie Nielsen.
I have said elsewhere that I don't think this character is the Doctor. I think come the final episode it's going to tiurn out that the real Doctor has been tied up in a box somewhere in the TARDIS while this pathetic impostor pretends to be him. I may be wrong--I hope so--but so far I've not seen any sign of the Doctor I remember.
Apart from that, Mr Slavering Fanboy, what did you think of the show? Well, it suffered from the usual problems people have with so-called time paradoxes, and here I'm skating close to the Q word so I'll try and steer clear, honest. What we have is the City On the Edge Of Forever plot, for those who remember Star Trek: time traveller saves beloved person's life only to discover that s/he has Changed The Past and therefore everything has to be undone and the beloved person has to die All Over Again, sob sob. The old DW would have taken four to six episodes to explore the ramifications of the change in history, showing how the future diverges because of this seemingly trivial event, putting regular cast members in moustaches and eyepatches and redressing the set to look almost but not quite familiar, and so on. But this is the twenty-first century, we've only got forty minutes and nobody wants to think, so we have ghastly things called Reapers erupting out of thin air and swallowing people because there's a wound in time, apparently, and till it's healed they're going to go on sterilising the wound till everybody's dead.
The assumption, common in these stories, that there's a Proper Way history has to go and if it strays off the path the universe goes kafoofie is called determinism and we'll come back to it. The assumption that there are beasties living outside the time stream looking for a way in is well known to slavering fanboys: they're called chronovores and we saw one back in the Pertwee days. (I think one's appeared in the BF audios as well...) That they feast on human flesh is a new one on me: that's carnivores, surely? The assumption that if you meet yourself the universe will go into meltdown is also well-known and a good dramatic device, but doesn't hold up: the only thing Rose-grown-up and Rose-infant share is some DNA, none of the cells outside their brain will be the same, and even if they were it would be just like touching your own arm. There's no evidence anywhere that the universe cares who you are: why should it start now? But, as I say, it's a useful way of building tension, so let that pass.
The ending is not acceptable. Rose's dad decides, after Doc Useless has got chomped by a Reaper, that the only way to save the world is to heal the wound in time. For no adequately explored reason, the car that should have killed him is haunting him, driving round and round the church and popping in and out of view at random intervals. So the brave young chap runs out into his path and duly dies...hours later, in a completely different part of London, and in front of several witnesses who shouldn't have seen it happen.
This is not healing the wound in time. The only thing that could have healed the wound in time is for the death to happen in exactly the place and time it originally happened. Determinism isn't fuzzy, it's exact. If time is that picky that not stepping on a butterfly destroys the universe, then stepping on another butterfly half a mile away next Tuesday won't cut it. The universe is still toast, sorry, bye-bye. But no, all the Reapers wanted was a death, and sated on slaughter they duly wink out and everyone they ate comes back, just as if creatures from outside time were subject to time paradoxes as well. Rose has her closure, nobody else remembers anything (except seeing a terrible road accident, which will doubtless influence them in many new and exciting ways in this alternate future) and Rose and Doctor Incompetent walk off into the TARDIS, he looking from the rear remarkably like Charlie Chaplin, which may or may not be intentional.
I'm not usually this picky. My disbelief is quite easy to suspend and stays up for hours. But this incarnation of Doctor Who is so nearly good, so nearly right (I'm even getting used to the music, though I think the strings are lagging) and yet so infuriatingly wrong in so many ways that I think I could have coped better if they'd set it in New York and cast Leslie Nielsen.
no subject
The mysterious re-appearance of the car is definitely... mysterious. As in makes no sense. Unless...
I found myself wondering if Captain Jack was making his first appearance a week or three early, unannounced, driving a time-jumping car and searching for "that guy who must not be allowed to live another day". Now *that's* a Doctor Who-ish storyline!
But in the absence of the Doctor seeing the car and saying "hang on - that shouldn't happen!", I'm assuming this isn't a plot point they're planning to reveal later.
Must confess I did enjoy the Tyler family dynamics, though. Paul Cornell either needs to polish up his SFnal plotting some more, or just write us some more first-rate episodes of Corrie. =:o}
It was clear from the interview in "Confidential" that Paul thought he was doing something new and unique in having a Doctor who was literally unable to do anything to fix the situation. Unfortunately, every other fanboy-turned-pro-writer has had the same idea at one time or another, and Paul apparently hasn't noticed. Too busy being gainfully employed as an author to read all those books by other people, I guess.
As for the complaint that the Doctor doesn't do enough "saving the day" generally this series, it's worth noting there was plenty of this in the original series. In the earliest stories, it was often Ian who was the hero who saved the day, while the Doctor's function was to (literally) land everyone in the midst of the trouble, and then berate them for being too stupid to find their way out. But of course, he had the excuse of frailty.
Eric Saward had the "powerless Doctor around whom everything just happens" as a more or less permanent fixture during his tenure as script editor, too... Although usually then it was a consequence of being realistically outnumbered by the other players in the game, all with their own conflicting agendas. (There's a nice little dig at this in Lance Parkin's audio story, "Davros" in which a later commentator dismisses the Doctor's involvement in Davros' earlier defeats as minimal. "I beat him fair and square!" protests an indignant 6-Doc.)
no subject
Especially the miniature fanfic in the comments. [SNERK]
=:o}
no subject
This week. Hmm. If the Doctor knew everything would sort itself out, then it might fit the suggestion here, with it not being enough for Rose to be told bad things happen if you try to change your history, she has to see it. In a double length episode, we might have got more explanation, but I'm not sure the writers actually had an explanation to not have time for.